Justin Trudeau and Patrick Brazeau boxing match was just politics masquerading as charity

Can we dispense, please, with the idea that Saturday night’s boxing match between Liberal MP Justin Trudeau and Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau was first and foremost “for charity”? It raised $230,000 for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation, certainly, and both Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Brazeau have poignant personal reasons to want to help that organization. Fine. But for Mr. Brazeau, the Sun News broadcast team and most of the journalists and political observers who gathered in my Twitter feed, cancer seemed more useful as a pretext to justify what would otherwise have been considered a ghastly, unacceptable spectacle: Two politicians taking out their differences on each other’s faces.

I should say: I have no problem with boxing, though I don’t think I’ve deliberately watched a match since Mike Tyson tried to eat Evander Holyfield. And I wouldn’t even object, really, if parliamentary affairs occasionally did come to blows. Things get said in and around the House of Commons that, anywhere else, would lead to demands for pugilistic redress. (“Taliban Jack” Layton comes to mind.) At least fisticuffs would suggest that all the slurs and insults were something more than a dreary melodrama. I imagine most of the commentariat, however, would be appalled.

Yet in the weeks and days leading up to Saturday night, Mr. Brazeau made it quite clear that this fight was an intensely personal, ideological matter for him — that he wanted to knock Mr. Trudeau out cold in the name of conservatism. “I’ve never hid the fact that I wouldn’t mind to put the hurt on Justin,” he said last week. “The goal is to win, and to win at any price.” There is no reason to believe his tongue was planted in his cheek.

Still, nobody seemed to mind. It was all for cancer, people said, even as Sun TV promoted and covered the event like a battle of civilizations. In deft hands, that could have been good fun. But hosts Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley do not have deft hands: They’re ideological warriors, and they don’t pretend otherwise. The only humour on offer Saturday night was of the dark variety: At one point Mr. Levant suggested a win for Mr. Brazeau would be a blow against the Nanny State. He said, by way of example, that Canadians should be able to smoke whatever they want. He said this at a cancer fundraiser. Mr. Brazeau’s mother died of lung cancer.

Maybe you had to be there, at Ottawa’s fabulous Hampton Inn and Conference Centre, to get the full flavour. But what I saw was grotesque on every level, and I was surprised to find how angry it made me. In the third round, when Mr. Trudeau began pummelling Mr. Brazeau’s face at will, I found myself yelling at the referee to stop the fight. He did. Then Mr. Brazeau bragged that Mr. Trudeau had failed to knock him down. Mr. Trudeau, who handled this event with good humour from the start, looked both astonished and amused.

Or maybe he was just dazed. After the fight, Mr. Trudeau said Mr. Brazeau, who came out swinging but tired quickly, had him “seeing stars” in the first round, before he gathered his strength. Begging the honourable member’s pardon, what country is this, and what year? I’m not asking as a sporting pacifist. Quite the contrary: I’ve gritted my teeth through years of preachy hand-wringing about headshots and fighting in hockey. When an NHL player admits playing through a concussion, the journalism world denounces him as a wretched example to children. How can Mr. Trudeau’s comment be a non-issue?

Those were real punches the MP and the Senator were landing. That was real blood coming out of Mr. Brazeau’s face. And we’re not talking about comedians or washed-up baseball players fighting each other, here. These people run the country, ostensibly. They’re supposed to have some dignity.

Supposed to, but too often don’t. In the end, I think that’s why the fight sickened me — not because someone might have gotten hurt or because bloodsports are immoral, but because it was so familiar. What Justin Trudeau did to Patrick Brazeau’s face, Parliamentarians do to good oratory, honest debate, intelligent policymaking and our collective intelligence nearly every day they’re in Ottawa. And a majority of the few people who pay attention cheer them on. In such an environment, why not have two parliamentarians punch each other in the face on television and have Ezra Levant do commentary?

Mr. Brazeau, humiliated, says he wants a rematch. But surely he’d be better off running for MP, if only for the bigger audience. We put the kids to bed before boxing comes on. They go on field trips to Question Period.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.